1. Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of presentation application software and more particularly to processing presentation documents independently of the operation of a presentation application.
2. Description of the Related Art
Presentation software has formed the basis of corporate communications for well over a decade. Within the confines of the modern conference room, it has become nearly impossible to engage in oral discussion of a proposal without the use of a computer generated slide show. In this regard, the computerized presentation has become the mainstay of the oral presentation. Generally speaking, in a computerized presentation, a sequence of digital renderings of slides can be presented, either directly through a computer screen, or even through a projector or plasma presentation monitor. The individual slides, themselves, can include textual, audible and visual elements, including animated elements.
The prototypical presentation application includes a document processor, much like a word processor, in which the textual, visual and audible elements can be combined within a single slide show presentation. In this regard, each individual slide generally can follow a prescribed template, which can range from a free form workspace, to a highly structured arrangement of text, imagery and audio. In most cases, each slide will include a slide title and a slide body. While the slide title generally can include text only, the slide body can include free form text, bulleted or numbered lists, a picture, graph, chart, animation, audio and other such combinations.
While many presenters “play back” a slide-show presentation through the presentation interface of the presentation application, often it can be desirable to facilitate the playback of a presentation in the absence of a presentation application. In this regard, most presentation applications provide a tool for transforming a slide show presentation to a “stand-alone” presentation. In the stand-alone presentation mode, a slide-show viewer can be incorporated with the slide show such that the slide show can appear to be self-executing. Alternatively, a freely distributable slide show viewer can be distributed in concert with the distribution of a slide show so as to obviate the requirement that a recipient of the slide show presentation purchase an expensive license for presentation software.
Notably, conventional presentation software applications provide a mechanism for converting a traditional presentation configured for display with the application, to a markup language representation of the presentation for display within a content browser. In this regard, the conventional presentation application can retrieve each contextual element of the slide through the presentation application and can format the contextual elements using markup language tags equivalent to the proprietary formatting instructions of the presentation. Nevertheless, to convert a presentation to a markup language representation requires access to the presentation application.
Recently, the increasing popularity of Web conferencing and virtual classroom software has presented new challenges to the presentation of a slide show without the benefit of presentation software. In particular, presenters who generate slide shows for incorporation in a classroom or in an on-line conference generally convert the slide show to mere raster representations of the slides for inclusion in the conferencing or classroom application. By generating a bit-mapped raster representation, however, the content of the slide show becomes an ordinary image and any internal meaning will have become lost.
It will be recognized by the skilled artisan that to accomplish full integration with a non-presentation application, a contextual understanding of each slide in a slide show presentation can be important. In particular, some applications require access to the textual elements of a slide show so as to meet accessibility requirements. As an example, screen reader technologies for the visually impaired must be able to process the text contained in a slide show. Other applications would prefer access to the textual elements of a slide show so as to properly process each slide in a manner suitable for the particular application. For instance, in a Web conferencing or virtual classroom environment, it would be helpful to be able to generate an agenda from text within a slide show. Yet, once a slide show has been converted to raster imagery, it is no longer possible to extract the text from the slide show.